When an entrepreneur leaves a salaried job to pursue a venture, the conversation nearly always centres on them: the risk they’re taking, the opportunity they’re pursuing and the funding they need.

But for every entrepreneur who makes that leap, there’s often a spouse or partner who may not have chosen the startup life but is about to live it anyway.

These partners frequently lend savings, absorb extra housework and provide the emotional scaffolding that keeps the venture going. Despite this, they remain nearly invisible in both policy and research even though without them, many new businesses would never get off the ground.

Instead, governments typically pour resources like grants, accelerators and mentorship programs squarely at founders. These kinds of supports are usually designed for individual founders, and rarely acknowledge the wider household that is often sharing that risk in practice.

The costs borne by partners are real, and research like ours is only beginning to measure them.

The cost nobody is counting

More than 83,000 Canadian businesses were created in 2023 alone, according to Statistics Canada, and the vast majority of them were small, with four employees or fewer. For many of the entrepreneurs creating those businesses, there are families at home absorbing the consequences.

Scholars have paid close attention to how starting a business affects founders’ own mental health and happiness. What they have largely overlooked is the person standing next to the founder, even though work and family life are deeply intertwined, and........

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